When two long-time friends talk poems, writing, and promotion, you know it’s going to be a treat. Sarah and Cynthia first met more than 20 years ago in London, where they were both active in the open mic scene. In this In Conversation event they talk about both creativity and process: the structures of their respective collections as book-length “projects,” how their own journeys with OCD/anxiety have impacted their work; form and the relationship of form to writing in other genres (specifically how their recent collections opened the door for prose), and the benefits of joining forces this past year on book tour and book promotions.
What a joyful event! Dzvinia & María Luisa read poems and talked about multilingualism, translation, and poetry as church. While their relationship started as one of mentor and student, they now call one another cherished friends with a shared passion for exploring how primary languages shape identity and existence.
Massachusetts poets and friends Richard Hoffman and January Gill O’Neil join The Notebooks Collective for an evening of craft, conversation, and literary citizenship.
Free
About Richard
Richard Hoffman has published five books of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award, and his most recent, People Once Real. His other books include Half the House: a Memoir; the memoir Love & Fury; Interference and Other Stories; and Remembering the Alchemists & other essays. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston, and nonfiction editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
About January
January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road was a finalist for the 2024 New England Book Award. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a co-winner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2025 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). O’Neil earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA from New York University. She lives in Beverly, MA.chigan Notable Books)—all focus on rural Michigan culture
On January 28, 2025, poets Carolyn Oliver and Hannah Larrabee read from their respective collections and discussed both creativity and craft. Throughout the event, the two poets shared a reverence for science and deep wonder for–and curiosity in–the world (both seen and unseen).
Emotional openness. An invitation to think together. Fleda Brown and Anne-Marie Oomen aren’t just contemporaries; they’re friends and deep admirers of each other’s work.
Fleda says that she can “trust Anne-Marie’s poems and prose to struggle admirably with the same issues I struggle with–how to say it, how it was, including the ambient sounds and textures. There is no posturing in her work.” And Anne-Marie says “Fleda’s poems invite me to think with her, to watch the spirals of thought we all experience–but she finds a way to reveal how they just might be insights to daily life.”
Both acclaimed poets and essayists, Fleda and Anne-Marie are also both teachers, Michganders, and friends. They admire one another’s work because they see and listen deeply and make space for each other to explore the written word in various forms. There’s something magical about creatives who are so knowledgeable about each other’s work, and that’s the kind of conversation this promises to be: intimate, warm, curious and generous. We hope you’ll join us.
Free
About Fleda
Fleda Brown’s Doctor of the World (forthcoming this March) won the Finishing Line Press Chapbook Contest for 2024. Her eleventh full-length collection, The End of the Clockwork Universe will be out from Carnegie-Mellon University Press this fall. Previously, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press and was an Indie finalist. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. She has won the New Letters and the Ohio State Univ/The Journal awards for creative nonfiction. Her third collection of memoir-essays, Mortality, with Friends was published by Wayne State University Press (2021) was an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 27 years and directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, where she writes a monthly poetry column for the Record-Eagle newspaper. She is retired from the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.
About Anne-Marie
Anne-Marie Oomen received the Michigan Author Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2023-24. As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book won AWP’s Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award (University of Georgia Press), Michigan Notable Book Award, and a silver IPPY award. The Long Fields, (Cornerstone Press), is her most recent essay collection. Love, Sex and 4-H, (Next Generation Indie Award for memoir); Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, (Michigan Notable Books)—all focus on rural Michigan culture. She wrote Uncoded Women (poetry) and co-wrote the award-winning The Lake Michigan Mermaid and Lake Huron Mermaid with poet, Linda Nemec Foster. She also edited Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction (Michigan Notable Book). She has written seven plays, including award-winning Northern Belles (inspired by oral histories of women farmers), and Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, winner of the CTAM contest. She is founding editor of Dunes Review, former president and current board member of Michigan Writers, and serves as instructor at Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She appears at conferences throughout the country. She and her husband, David Early, have built their handmade home on wild acreage formerly stewarded by the tribes of the Three Fires Confederacy near Empire, Michigan, and beloved Lake Michigan. www.anne-marieoomen.com
Poets Cynthia Marie Hoffman and Sarah Kain Gutowski will read from their collected works, with an emphasis on their newest respective collections, both of which are cohesively themed (Cynthia’s is a memoir in prose poems, Sarah’s is a fabulist narrative in poems).
Sarah and Cynthia first met more than 20 years ago in London, where they were both active in the open mic scene. In this In Conversation event they’ll talk about both creativity and process: the structures of their respective collections as book-length “projects,” how their own journeys with OCD/anxiety have impacted their work; form and the relationship of form to writing in other genres (specifically how their recent collections opened the door for prose), and the benefits of joining forces this past year on book tour and book promotions.
Free
About Cynthia
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Exploding Head, an OCD memoir in prose poems. Essays in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.
About Sarah
Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of The Familiar, a fabulist narrative-in-poems about female existential crisis, and Fabulous Beast: Poems. Her poetry has appeared in various print and online journals, including The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It’s All Too Much, a limited-edition audio project. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and New York Journal of Books. http://www.sarahkaingutowski.com.
Multi-lingual poets Dzvinia Orlowsky and María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado will read from their respective bodies of work and discuss their poetry and creative processes. While their relationship started as one of mentor and student, they now call one another cherished friends with a shared passion for exploring how primary languages shape identity and existence.
Of Dzvinia, María Luisa says: “I was researching MFA programs with poets as mentors who would take the cultural languages of my experiences seriously, who would understand that some of my poems code-switched in Puerto Rican Spanish or German or Farsi were inspired by real relationships. A narrative poet, I immediately connected with Dzvinia’s online faculty bio and the lyrical pacing of her poems. Imagine my exponential joys in working with Dzvinia as my workshop leader who startled me and my peers with her uncannily spiritual way of responding to the heat in some of our lines and her gentle weeding of words that muffled the music in a poem.”
Of María Luisa, Dzvinia says: “María Luisa’s writing continues to move me with its depth and courage, imbued with the cultural language of her experiences and a rare sensitivity to the demands of storytelling. Her lyrical narratives delve into profound themes: grappling with familial violence, witnessing eruptions of public and political violence, and reflecting on the complex interplay of gender roles and cultural identity. I am drawn to her aspiration to connect with the universe on a spiritual level, seeking bonds that transcend Immediate reality, and I look forward to exploring in conversation how these shared ambitions shape our work.”
Dzvinia Orlowsky,a Pushcart Prize poet, translator, a Four Way Books founding editor, has authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts, and her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Prize selected by Robert Pinsky.
Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the 2022 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s 2022 National Translation Award and winner of the 2020-2021 AAUS Prize for Translation. They received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship for their translation of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024), and their co-translation of Oleksander Dovzhenko’s novella, Enchanted Desna, is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2025.
About María Louisa
Born in Manatí, Puerto Rico and raised in Springfield, MA, María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado received a BA from Colby College and an MA from Tufts University in German, her third language. The opportunity to work with poets Dzvinia Orlowsky and Laure-Anne Bosselaar under poet Meg Kearney’s transformational leadership led her to pursue her MFA at Pine Manor College (July 2015). Currently she is a Clark Diversity Fellow joyfully pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University.
María Luisa writes poetry and prose that code-switch between American English, Puerto Rican Spanish, German and Farsi, the cultural languages of her experiences. Her collections include Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024), Landscapes: photos & poems (MultiCreative Wisdom, 2023), Resistencia: Resilience: essays & poems (Human Error Publishing, 2023), Destierro Means More than Exile: a tribute to 32 women poets (2018); and Gathering Words: recogiendo palabras (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2008). In 2024, she curated and published Pán•o•ply, the inaugural MultiCreative Wisdom anthology featuring creative writers who identify as women or non-binary; and as BIPOC.
For 18+ years of facilitating poetry workshops and readings, many in partnership with the Springfield City Library, she was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA (2014-2016) and a New England Public Radio’s Arts and Humanities recipient (2016). In May 2024, she received an honorary degree in fine arts from Smith College in recognition of her impact as a multilingual Boricua poet and intersectional feminist educator.
Poets Carolyn Oliver and Hannah Larrabee will read from their respective collections and discuss both creativity and craft. Like us, Carolyn read Hannah’s collection and asked herself–more than once–how did they do that? And Hannah wants to know how Carolyn’s poems take us places beyond reach and into the warping of spacetime.
These poets share a reverence for science and deep wonder for–and curiosity in–the world (both seen and unseen). Hannah says: “We’re hoping to geek out a bit about science and plan to talk through poems that explore the spellbinding world around us–here, on Earth, and in the cosmos.”
Carolyn adds: “It’s such luck to call Hannah my friend, and I look forward to talking about space and darkness and flowers (and perhaps a tree frog or two?) with this kind and wise and luminous poet.”
Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks, including, most recently, Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Image, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review, Consequence, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts.
About Hannah
Hannah Larrabee’s Wonder Tissue won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize and her new book—The Observable Universe—was longlisted for a Massachusetts Book Award. Hannah was selected by NASA to write poetry for the Webb Telescope program at Goddard Space Center and she participated in the Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard. She’s had poems and reviews in Whale Road, EcoTheo, Adirondack Review, Glass Poetry Journal, among others. Hannah lives in Salem, Massachusetts and is an editor at Nixes Mate Review.
Poets and co-founders of Bear Review, Marcus Myers & Rivka Clifton have grown together as poets, even as their own work is aesthetically different. As Marcus says, “This sharing and cheering each other on, discussing craft and aesthetics, swapping and giving books with and to each other has led, in some ways directly and in others indirectly, to our creating Bear Review.”
We welcomed poets Karen Rigby and Danika Stegeman to The Notebooks Collective for an evening of poetry and conversation. The discussion explored musings on second books, ars poetica, and more!
